


meet my mother on the other side

by evewithanapple



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, POV Nile Freeman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 04:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26347267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: The lives they touch, they touch briefly. Sometimes it's hard to let go.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 101





	meet my mother on the other side

**Author's Note:**

> The "kid fic" tag makes it sound like this fic is going to be cute. It . . . is not. The kid's fine! But it's not that kind of kid fic.

The country they’re in is in the middle of a regime change, which is going as all regime changes seem to: bloodier and crueler every day. Andy warned Copley before they came that they wouldn’t be taking sides (she muttered something about Cuba, and Nile made a mental note to ask about that later) but that they’ll try and get as many civilians out of the line of fire as they can. He accepted that. It’s not like he could really do anything else, but he’s at least polite about it.

The city is split down the middle between neighbourhoods that have mostly avoided becoming collateral damage, and the ones that are mostly piles of rubble. It’s those neighbourhoods they spend most of their time in. She’s got her semi-automatic tucked into a thigh holster, though she doesn’t expect she’ll have to use it. The fighting’s moved on; today is about search and rescue.

So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise when she finds the little boy. He’s wandering down the middle of the road, barefoot and dressed in nothing but a (filthy) t-shirt and diaper that are nowhere near enough to protect him from the cold. The first thing she does is scoop him up and zip him into her jacket, setting her chin down on the top of his head. “Hey, buddy,” she says. “Where’s your mom?”

He doesn’t say anything. She’s pretty sure he’s not actually old enough to form complete sentences – he was walking in that bowlegged toddler way that indicates he’s only just figured out how to support his own weight. He just sucks on his fingers, staring vacantly at some point over Nile’s shoulder. He smells exactly as clean as he looks; his hair might be blond, but it’s hard to tell under all the dirt. Nile shuffles him in her arms until he’s resting in the crook of her elbow, and steps to the doorway of the nearest house. The door’s already cracked open, just wide enough for a toddler to wriggle out of. “Is this home?”

She takes a half-step into the hallway before she’s overcome with the sweet smell of rot. She stumbles backwards, gagging. The little boy doesn’t stir in her arms, even when Nile pulls one arm up to cover her nose. She really doesn’t need to go in there to know what she’ll find: she knows that smell from when she was a kid and a mouse died in one of the apartment vents. That’s not day-old death. The bodies in that house have been there for a week, at least. She could just back away and leave them; there’s nothing she can do for them, and the kid is still very much alive and needs her. But she wouldn’t be doing her job if she didn’t at least check.

Inside, she finds exactly what she expected. Three bodies – one old man, and a man and woman who she assumes are the kid’s parents – all slumped over the kitchen table. She thinks they were shot, but it’s hard to tell. Through a doorway, she glimpses a crib sitting close to the ground, low enough for a small person to climb out of with minimal injuries. She doesn’t bother sweeping the rest of the house, just backs out the way she came. The baby is still silent, almost eerily so.

She nearly backs right into Nicky, who’s standing just outside. She jumps in spite of herself, spinning around to find him with both hands raised. “Easy.” Then he spots the toddler, and his brow furrows. “Who’s this?”

“Came from in there, I think.” She jerks her head back towards the house. “No one else left. Hey, you got any thermals in that pack? He’s freezing.”

Nicky sets his backpack down and tugs it open, retrieving a silver blanket that winks in the late afternoon sun. Nile unzips her jacket again and passes the baby over, and Nicky wraps him up. He goes without a fuss, gaze still vacant, fingers still in his mouth. She should probably put a stop to that – his hands aren’t any cleaner than the rest of him – but it’s not the most pressing item on her to-do list at the moment. “We should get him back to the safe house,” she says instead. “I don’t think he’s had anything to eat in awhile. Where’s Joe and Andy?”

Joe and Andy are, as it turns out, sweeping the next street over with the same results as Nile’s. There’s a dead body lying out in the open at the end of the street, sprawled out under the bent remnant of what might have once been a streetlamp. Nile takes the baby back from Nicky and presses his face against her shoulder. “Don’t look,” she whispers to him, though she’s not at all sure he hears her, and very sure that he doesn’t understand.

Maybe the body is why Andy doesn’t object to the idea of taking the baby back to the safe house. Nile had an argument all prepared – there’s no one else here to take him and the nearest Red Cross station is a good hundred miles away – but she doesn’t have to employ any of them, because Andy just nods, and they all pile into the back of the Jeep. No car seats, obviously, so Nile squeezes in between Joe and Nicky and holds the kid tightly on her lap. About halfway back, he starts to make a low keening sound on and off, like he’s testing whether or not any of them will respond. She bounces him on her knees a little, rubbing his back and humming. It doesn’t calm him, exactly, but it stops him from all-out crying, so she takes the win.

When they get back, she stops in the kitchen long enough to scribble down a shopping list, which Joe grabs from her as she takes the kid into the tiny bathroom. They have a tub, fortunately – not one any of them actually use (it’s barely big enough for her to sit in with her knees drawn up to her chest) but it’ll serve for her current purpose. She pulls off the t-shirt and diaper while the water runs, tosses them both in the nearby trash can, and then sets him down in the tub. That’s what prompts his first actual yell.

“Oh, now we’re talking, huh?” She grabs the bar of soap and sets to scrubbing his hair. “Thought you’d be happy to get those nasty clothes off. You’ll feel better once you’re clean, I promise.”

Here, sitting in the tub with water dripping down his hair and face, he looks so much like her little cousins that it steals her breath for a second. Not physically, of course not physically – but there’s something in the eyes that grabs her heart and yanks. The chubby toddler cheeks, the tiny hands batting at the washcloth she’s using to scrub his face, the feeling of soft baby hair under her hands – she’s been here before, hasn’t she? If she closes her eyes, she could almost believe she’s back in her aunt’s apartment, giving Isaiah his bath before putting him to bed. All that’s missing is the smell of the baby shampoo her aunt always bought from Walgreen’s, some kind of drugstore brand that promised “no tears” on the label. Instead, there’s just the harsh lye smell of the soap they managed to find in the local market, stuff that’s already leaving her hands dry and cracked after less than a week of use. She put shampoo on the shopping list, but she hadn’t wanted to wait until they got back. The kid really needed a bath.

She’s so lost in thought, she doesn’t notice the suds sliding down his forehead until they land in his eye. He lets out a real scream then, loud enough to rattle her eardrums. She jumps, wincing as she grabs a clean washcloth to wipe the rest away. “Sorry, sorry.”

There’s a knock on the door. Andy’s voice. “Are you killing the kid in there?”

“You’re welcome to take over!” Nile calls over her shoulder. The baby’s still crying, and Nile grabs the showerhead to rinse away what’s left of the soapsuds before lifting him out and wrapping him in a towel. The bottom of the tub is caked with grime, and she grimaces, knowing it’ll almost certainly be her job to scrub it out. 

Now that he’s mostly dirt-free, she can see that she was right about his hair – it’s fair, almost cornsilk blond and straggling in his eyes. The edges are a little ragged, like his mother cut it at home and wasn’t quite sure of how to keep it even. She towels his hair off, laughing as it stands up in damp spikes. He’s stopped crying now, reverting to his earlier blank stare. Nile pulls an experimental face at him, hoping for a giggle. Nothing.

Isaiah had loved this game. He’d clap his hands and chant, “muh, muh, muh” while she stuck her tongue out and wiggled her ears and generally turned her face into silly putty for his amusement. She tries a couple more faces, and is rewarded with more of the same blank stare. It’s like he’s locked somewhere inside himself, only poking his head out to protest when something hurts.

“What happened, huh?” she says, staring intently into his eyes like they might hold some kind of answer. They don’t of course. He can’t tell her what he’s witnessed over the past week, and probably doesn’t even clearly remember himself. Nothing but impressions, a whirlwind of screams and blood and fear. Some of the kids she met in Afghanistan had this same stare, but she’d been able to break through with bribes of candy or bouncy balls. They’d been older, though. Was it easier for them to bounce back when they were old enough to understand? When a kid was this hurt, this young, was it even possible to fix what broke?

There’s another knock on the door. This time, it’s Joe’s voice intruding. “Did someone order clothes?”

She smiles in spite of herself and gets up, resting the kid on her hip as she opens the door. “Someone did,” she says as she accepts the bag from him. “Thank you.”

He nods to the kid, who’s sucking on his fingers again. “Need a break?”

Nile looks at him, and then back at the kid. She wonders if he’d have any reaction at being passed from person to person, or if they’re all in the same “terrifying stranger” category to him. His gaze is just as vacant when he looks at Joe. She hugs him a little closer, thinking that maybe it matters more to her than to him. “I’ve got it,” she says. “Thanks, though.”

He nods. “Dinner in five. Andy made it though, so – “ He lets the wrinkle of his nose speak for itself, and Nile laughs.

When she emerges again, this time with the kid fully dressed and still resting on her hip, the others are all seated around the table. She thinks of the scene at the house earlier, and her stomach gives a queasy lurch as she settles into the remaining chair.

The dinner is, as promised, an Andy specialty, which means it’s burned around the edges and cold in the middle. Andy must catch the look on her face, because she scoffs. “Don’t start with me. I know they fed you worse shit than this in the marines.”

“Language,” Nile says mildly, covering the kid’s ears. Andy just snorts. “And just because we can survive salmonella doesn’t mean he can.”

“We thought of that,” Nicky speaks up from across the table. He pushes a cup of applesauce over to Nile. “This is what babies eat, yes?”

“Slightly younger babies, but yes.” She still flips the cup upside down to check the expiry date (two weeks away) before she peels the foil off and dips a spoon in. She offers it to the kid, who just whines and turns his face away. “You gotta eat,” she says to him, but he just whines again.

“Here.” Joe says, and she does hand the kid over this time, along with the applesauce and the spoon. Maybe the kid has preferences after all, because he lets Joe feed him pieces of toast ( _not_ made by Andy, she suspects, because none of them are burned) dipped in the applesauce. With her hands free, she has no excuse for neglecting her dinner, so she digs in. It’s pierogis tonight, which are more or less impossible to ruin completely (and it helps that they came out of a box) so it’s not really that much of a hardship to chow down on them. Besides, she’s hungry.

She nods at Joe, who’s managed to get most of the toast and at least half of the applesauce into the kid. “You look like you’ve had practice.”

“He has,” Nicky says from the other side of the table. “We’ve raised children before.”

He says it just as Nile takes a bite of food, which she promptly chokes on. It’s only Joe whacking her between her shoulder blades with his free hand that keeps her from adding “choked to death on pierogi” to her tally of ways she’s died so far. “Wh- you _what_?”

“We’ve been alive for a long time, Nile,” Joe says. The baby now has the applesauce spoon in his mouth. She hopes it had applesauce on it when it went in. “It hasn’t all been fighting. Sometimes we took a few decades off.”

She looks at Andy, who tips back in her chair, mock-scowling. “Don’t look at me. I had nothing to do with it.”

“She usually spent those years on vacation,” Nicky says, sotto voce. Andy clearly hears him anyway, because she makes a rude noise. “It was just as well. We had very strict rules about letting the children play with weapons.”

“Would’ve been good for them,” Andy mutters, then gets up from the table, scraping her chair across the floor. “I could handle an axe by the time I was ten, and look at me now.”

“We are,” Joe says, “that’s what made it an easy decision.” Andy lobs a dishtowel at him, and the baby squeals. Nile turns to look at him again. It’s the first unprompted noise he’s made since they got him back. The towel landed on Joe’s shoulder; as she watches, the baby reaches up to grab handfuls of it, then further up to tug on Joe’s beard. “Ow,” he says mildly, but doesn’t try to pry to kid’s hands away.

Nile stands up as well. “He should be in bed,” she says, and holds her arms out. “Or – wherever he’s going to sleep. The couch?”

He ends up sleeping in a makeshift nest of blankets and couch cushions that they pull out to sit on the floor. The safe house doesn’t have a proper bedroom anyway, just a worn-out curtain separating the sleeping area from the main room, so it doesn’t make much of a difference. Nile still sleeps closest to the curtain, figuring that since the baby is really her responsibility – she’s the one who picked him up – she should be the first one up if he cries during the night.

She only wakes once, as it turns out, and it’s not because of any crying. She’s not sure at first what prompts it at all – she can hear Nicky snoring softly on her other side, and a siren somewhere off in the distance. The baby is gurgling a little, but nowhere close to crying. She lays awake for several seconds, ears straining for anything more, but there’s nothing. Just insomnia, she guesses.

A shadow passes by the curtain – Andy’s shadow, she knows. Even if she didn’t recognize the silhouette, she knows by now that if Joe was up, Nicky would be too, so the process of elimination is fairly simply. She squints as Andy passes back in the other direction. Her shadow is oddly shaped, and it takes Nile a moment to realize it’s because she’s holding the baby in her arms. She says something, too soft to hear, and the baby gurgles again in response. Nile stays where she is, eyes open against the dark, until she blinks and then it’s morning again.

* * *

Whatever gentle mood Andy was in last night has dissipated, and it doesn’t take long to find out why. “Road’s blockaded,” she says brusquely over breakfast. “Can’t get in or out. We could shoot out way through, but – “

“But that would be a waste of time and bullets,” Nicky cuts in smoothly. He’s the one feeding the baby this morning, although he’s having limited success. Nile’s theory that the kid just prefers Joe is strengthening by the hour. “A day’s delay is nothing.”

“It is when one of us has to stay here and babysit.” Andy crosses her arms. “If we go out, we can’t pair off. It’s dangerous.”

“It’s not like this has been a high-risk mission up to now,” Nile points out, coming to Nicky’s rescue by taking the baby away after he spits applesauce in Nicky’s face. “But if you’re really worried, you could volunteer to stay back. You’re the most v –“

Andy stabs her fork in Nile’s direction. “Finish that sentence, I dare you.”

Nile ends up being the one left behind. Once again, it’s a process of elimination thing – Andy won’t (Nile does not even consider bringing up what she saw last night, because she’s not actively _trying_ to die) and Joe and Nicky are a package deal on missions. She doesn’t especially mind. Part of her twinges at not being able to have Andy’s back – yeah, okay, sure she _can_ take care of herself but that doesn’t mean she always _does_ – but as she herself pointed out, this whole mission has been pretty much violence-free, and there’s no sign of that changing. And between Andy and the baby, it’s obvious who actually needs looking after.

So she passes a very boring day at the safehouse. She plays “this little piggy” and peekaboo, narrates out loud to him as she makes lunch, and – when she’s well and truly out of ideas – sets him up with her phone and a playlist of Raffi videos. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on her part, but he seems to be responding more than he did yesterday. His head bobs along to the music, his eyes follow her when she moves, and at one point, he grabs her braids when they swing too close to his face. He’s still not laughing, but there’s a couple of expressions that could almost pass for a smile. It’s progress.

She also keeps the radio on in case of any news, not that it’s much use – she doesn’t speak the language yet, and nobody’s reporting locally anyway. It’s not until the others get back that she finds out that the road blockade is lifted, and they should be able to get through to the Red Cross base.

“ _First_ thing tomorrow,” Andy says, giving Nile a penetrating look. Nile, who is on the couch with the baby in her lap, swallows hard. Obviously they have to go. They’re not the baby’s parents, or next of kin, or in any way more qualified to take care of him than the aid workers who are trained to deal with war orphans. They have a job to do, and it’s not to take time off and play house while the city keeps on burning. It’s the right thing to do, the responsible thing.

But. _But_.

After everyone else is in bed, Nile creeps back out to the main room and picks the baby up. He’s still fast asleep, though he reflexively curls his fingers around her shirt when she hugs him against her chest. The outfit Joe and Nicky picked up at the supermarket is actually a onesie, complete with attached feet and little rubber grips on the soles. It’s flannel, too, so he’s warm even without the blanket she wrapped him in earlier. She sits down on the couch again, curling up against one of the arms. The baby sleeps on.

“Nile?”

She glances up. Nicky is standing in the curtain-doorway, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Everything all right?”

“Fine.” She shifts the baby in her arm. “Everything’s fine, I just – “

Nicky has this way of responding to what she’s about to say before it ever leaves her mouth, and this time is no exception. He nods. “You want coffee?”

“Probably not a good idea.” She slides further down on the couch cushion, trying to get comfortable. “If I want to get any sleep at all tonight, anyway.”

“You should,” he says. He sits down across from her, fixing her with a mild look that still somehow feels like a jab to the solar plexus. Someday, she’s going to figure out how he does it. He nods at the baby. “You did well, you know. Finding him.”

“Yeah, well.” She shifts him in her arms. “What happens to him now?”

“The Red Cross happens,” Nicky says. “We’ve worked with them before – well,” he amends, catching the look on her face, “we’ve worked adjacent to them. They’re good people, Nile. They’ll take care of him.”

“Take care of him, how?” Her arms tighten until the baby makes a little fussy noise in his sleep. “Send him to an orphanage?”

She’s seen stories about Russian orphanages on the news, CNN reporters in spotless blazers walking around rooms filled with filthy, crying children. She knew very well it was poverty porn, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch. This isn’t Russia, but she doesn’t think the conditions would be much better. Was that what she saved him for? A childhood spent rotting in a crib, neglected, until he learned that there was no point bothering to cry for help?

She doesn’t even realize she’s saying all of this out loud until Nicky interrupts her. “Nile.” He sits forward, hands spread on his knees. “You don’t know what will happen next. It could be an orphanage, yes.” He pauses. “Or they could find a family to take him in. They could find relatives. They would not have those chances, if you hadn’t saved him.”

She buries her face in the baby’s hair. “What relatives?” she says, voice muffled. “We don’t even know his _name_.”

There’s a rustling noise, and she looks up. Nicky’s pushing a packet of papers across the coffee table to her. “I went back to his neighbourhood,” he says, nodding to them. “Picked those up in the house. They should help.”

Sniffling a little, she picks them up and flips through them. Because of all the government back-and-forth, the country they’re in doesn’t currently have any standardization for official documents, so they’re a bit of a mess. But the little inked footprint speaks for itself, and so does the baby picture and the name and dates underneath it. She was right about his age – he’s just under a year old. The family name has too many syllables for her to even try to pronounce, but the first name is easy enough. “Ruslan, huh?’ She rubs her cheek against his hair. “I knew a Ruslan in Basic Training. His parents were from Chechnya.”

“It’s from a poem,” Nicky says, “a Russian one.” He chuckles. “Joe could tell you. It was the first thing he noticed when we picked it up.”

She swallows against the lump in her throat. “Thanks, Nicky.”

He just shrugs. “It’s our job.” He goes on watching as she hugs Ruslan tight, rocking him a little and humming a lullaby under her breath. “I mean it, Nile. You did well saving him. We can’t know what will happen next, but he has chances that he wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t found him. He will live another day because of you.” There’s an ancient sadness in his eyes, and it hits her all over again that he’s old enough to have seen generations of children grow old and die. What does one baby’s life look like, from that vantage point? “If you grow attached to them all, try to follow their lives, you’ll drive yourself mad. You have to let others carry that burden for you.”

She swallows hard again. “I don’t know how.”

“I know,” he says simply. “But you’ll learn. And we’ll help you.” He gets up then, steps around the coffee table to sit beside her on the couch. He watches her in silence for several more moments before saying, so gently, “there’s something else, isn’t there?”

Now she has to fight to keep her voice under control. She knows she won’t be judged for it, but she’d judge herself, which is almost worse. “I didn’t – “ She hiccups. Nicky reaches out to rub her back. “I always kind of figured I’d have kids eventually, you know? I didn’t have a plan for it, it was just – I assumed. I had time.” A choked noise claws its way up out of her throat. “I guess I still do, but I can’t – the life I thought I’d have, I’m never getting that.”

Nicky pulls her into a hug, putting his arms around her and Ruslan and setting his chin on her head. “I know,” he says. “I know. Life is never what we expect it to be, but you have the right to mourn what you lost. None of us begrudge you that.”

She lets herself relax into his arms while he sways almost imperceptibly – like she does with the baby, she thinks, and can’t decide whether to laugh or cry at the comparison.

At last, she sniffles again and sits up. “You and Joe said – “ She chews on her lip. “You said you raised kids, sometimes.”

He nods.

“ _How_?” Every time she thinks she’s got her head around the lives they live, one of them will drop a casual comment that knocks her completely off-course. “Where do you even – what did you tell people? Didn’t they notice you weren’t aging? And how could you handle – Booker, he told me about his family, he said – “

“Nile.” Nicky puts a hand up to stop her babbling. “With Booker, it was different. He went back to a family that had known him when he was mortal and expected it to be the same. That was his mistake.” He nods at the papers in her hands. “As to how – the demand for documentation we have now is an invention of the twentieth century. Before, no one would question us for taking in a child. They could be a niece or nephew, or a servant, or an illegitimate offspring one of us decided to acknowledge.” He sighs. “The lack of curiosity allowed for a great deal of suffering, but it also meant we did not have to be so careful about hiding as we are now. And yes, it meant we could have families.” He gives her a squeeze with the arm still around her shoulders. “It is more difficult now, but not impossible. You could choose that path someday, if you wanted.”

The unspoken caveat: _but not now_. If things were different, maybe – but while she has all the time in the world, there’s still Andy to think about. If she dropped out of the game for twenty years and then came back, Andy might not be there. She has to be careful about her time, at least for now. But a hundred years down the line, if she wants – if she can – then maybe. Maybe.

She kneels down on the floor and settles Ruslan back into his nest of pillows. He’s sucking on his fingers even in his sleep. “Thanks, Nicky.”

“Of course.” He rubs her back. “Now get some sleep, yes? You know when Andy says ‘first thing,’ she means it. She won’t hesitate to throw cold water on you if you’re not up by five.”

Nile gives a wet chuckle, then gets up and follows him back into the bedroom.

* * *

As promised, Andy drags her out of bed at five the next morning, though she does at least refrain from using the cold water. They’re buckled into the Jeep and on the road by five-thirty, Ruslan still sleeping in Nile’s lap, his papers tucked in an inside pocket of her jacket. He wakes up after about twenty minutes rattling around in the Jeep, and she starts to hum to him again.

Andy glances at her from the driver’s seat. “That song,” she says, “it’s American, isn’t it? I remember it from the Civil War.”

Of course she does. “Yeah,” Nile says, “it is.” It’s _Michael, Row The Boat Ashore_ , which her aunt had sung to her every night she babysat when Nile was little. And then Nile had grown up and sang it to Isaiah and his sister. She’ll never know what songs Ruslan’s mother would wanted to pass on to him, but she can at least offer something of hers.

By the time they’ve reached the Red Cross base, he’s fully awake in her arms and fussing, bored with the Jeep and hungry for breakfast. She gets out, legs slightly unsteady after almost two hours folded under the seat, and glances back at Andy. “You coming?”

Andy shakes her head. “I’ll wait.” She gives them both a look that, on a different person’s face, might be considered soft. “Good luck, kid.”

The base is more a collection of tents than anything else, and Nile wanders around in circles for several minutes before a passing aid worker takes pity on her. He says something to her in a language that sounds like Polish, and she shakes her head. “Uh- _nie rozumiem_. English?”

“English, yes.” He switches without missing a beat, and she wonders how many languages he speaks. How many she’ll end up speaking. “Can I help you?”

“I, uh,” Ruslan is still fussing in her arms, though she fed him several graham crackers while wandering around looking for help. “I’m not – this baby, his parents were killed in the fighting further south. We didn’t have the resources to find any other family members, and we thought - ”

“Oh, of course,” he says briskly, like he gets people handing war orphans off to him every day. Which, granted, he probably does. “We have a tent for the children to stay in while we sort out the paperwork. Here, let me.” Before she knows what’s happening, he reaches out and lifts Ruslan from her arms, settling him on his hip with practiced ease. She wants to protest, _at least let me say goodbye_ , but she’s had a full day to say goodbye and it’s probably better not to drag this out. Besides, it’s not like he notices; he reacts to the aid worker with the same blank nonchalance as he reacted to the rest of them.

“I’ve got some of his papers here.” She fumbles in her jacket and produces the bundle with the birth certificate. “There’s some family information there. His name’s Ruslan.” She hesitates, then adds, “um, he likes applesauce. And music.”

“I’ll tell the nurses,” he says, taking the papers, “and I’ll take this to the administrative tent. Is there anything else?”

And there really isn’t, so she has no excuse to linger. She reaches out and smooths a hand down over Ruslan’s hair, a final blessing. “Take care of him,” she says, which is a little presumptuous of her – he obviously knows what he’s doing – but she has to say it anyway.

“Of course,” the aid worker says, “thank you.” And then they’re gone.

Andy gives her a long look when she climbs back into the Jeep. “You okay?”

Nile sighs, resting her forehead against the window. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess.” There’s a dull ache in her chest, but by the standards of the past year, it’s nothing. She’ll survive.

Andy, whose tendency to refrain from comment Nile is suddenly very grateful for, says nothing. She just hits the gas, and they roll out.

* * *

When they get back, Joe’s in the kitchen making breakfast and Nicky’s sitting at the table, reading. Nile slumps into the seat next to him, and it’s only seconds before Joe’s sliding a plate in front of her. “Eat,” he says. His eyes are soft when she looks up at him. “You need it.”

She nods her thanks and starts to fork scrambled eggs into her mouth. Unlike Andy, Joe’s reliably skilled in the kitchen so they taste amazing. Nicky and Joe both wait until her plate is half-empty before Nicky nudges her shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

Nile looks up at him. Joe’s finished cooking and slid into the opposite seat, and they’re both watching her like hawks. Concerned hawks. “I’m – “ She pushes her fork around the remains of the eggs. “I’ve been worse.”

Joe lets out a dry laugh. “Careful, you’re starting to sound like – “ He stops abruptly, and Nile bites down on the inside of her cheek. It’s been a year, but some topics are still raw.

She changes the subject. She was planning to, anyway. “Your other kids,” she says, “the ones you mentioned.” She between the two of them. “Tell me about them?”

They exchange one of their patented looks, the kind that contain whole conversations in a single glance. Nicky puts one of his hands on top of hers and squeezes. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we can do that.” And they do.

**Author's Note:**

> [Ruslan and Ludmila](https://russian-crafts.com/russian-folk-tales/ruslan-and-ludmila.html) by Alexander Pushkin


End file.
